The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Olga Mexina

Sitting in the circle of his letters in the grove that rustles
with scorn and error,
the heart blowing like a scrap of paper through the inhospitable
passageways. -Tomas Tranströmer, from Gogol I create worlds. Probably not very successfully yet, and…

Aja Gabel

So, the Pulitzer board pissed a lot of people off this week. They pissed off the publishing industry, as reported here, causing publishers and booksellers to give out their own awards. They pissed off Sandra McNally of the independent New York bookstore…

Zachary Martin

Outside the Department of English yesterday, I paused to watch a young man in a cape pass. He was striding toward the building, looking cautiously over his shoulder every few seconds, and he carried with him a Nerf bat and a toy gun capable of firing…

Chuck Carlise

At the endings of things, it's normal to look backward for clues on how to make sense of what we have done, why we've been doing it, and what it will mean in the future. With that in mind, as I begin the final sprint toward a PhD in Poetry at UH this…

Layla Benitez-James

I refuse to chalk it entirely up to the fact that it is just "that time in the semester," but my little brain has been refusing to stay focused on any one task. This has led to a sad cycle of intense concentration, followed by failure, followed by a chastisement…

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller

1. Young artists are supposed to find their voice. One of the nicest things you might hear, as a young artist, is that you seem to have found your voice. Or your voice is quite clear. Or, even better: your voice, among all the voices in your workshop,…

Allie Rowbottom

Many readers of this post, by virtue of its place of publication, are familiar with the slow bodily decay that grad school entails. For example, as I write and revise these very words, I am simultaneously polishing off a pint of (vegan) ice cream, as…

Elizabeth Winston

I've been thinking recently about the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, as I do every few years. This time, it's in part because I'm doing research for a lit paper on what Foucault called the "Great Confinement" of the 17th Century, when the mentally ill…

Meggie Monahan

One evening last summer, my best friend Christopher and I were drinking wine and watching the sun go down over the Atlantic Ocean when he decided that it was the perfect time to give a solemn recap of South Park's mid-season finale, "You're Getting Old."…

Ashley Wurzbacher

Since its publication in Sunday's New York Times, Annie Murphy Paul's "Your Brain on Fiction" has gone viral among my friends and fellow writers. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here. In the piece, Paul calls attention to research into the…